The Inside Scoop!

Patrick Carr

The Shock of Night

I grew up in…almost everywhere. My dad was in the Air Force and we moved a lot until I was about 10. After that, we settled in middle Tennessee.

I was inspired to write my first published novel by…a verse in the Bible that got me to thinking “What if the Church still cast lots to make decisions?”

The books that have most influenced my life are…The Bible, The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, and The Lord of the Rings

My biggest challenge when writing is…Trying to capture the emotional impact of the scenes in my head and converting them into words on the page. Compared to that, characterization is relatively easy.

One of my favourite authors is…Brandon Sanderson. He’s so wonderfully adept and in-depth with his world-building. I think he would have made a fine engineer or inventor.

If I wasn’t a writer, I would be…A school teacher. Hey! Look at that. I am!

The superhero talent I would love to have is…Invisibility. I would sneak into all sort of places and bring hidden things to light.

The Shock of Night

When one man is brutally murdered and the priest he works for mortally wounded on the streets of Bunard, Willet Dura is called to investigate. Yet the clues to the crime lead to contradictions and questions without answers. As Willet begins to question the dying priest, the man pulls Willet close and screams in a foreign tongue. Then he dies without another word.

Willet returns to the city, no closer to answers than before, but his senses are skewed. People he touches appear to have a subtle shift, a twist seen at the edge of his vision, and it’s as though he can see their deepest thoughts. In a world divided between haves and have-nots, gifted and common, Willet soon learns he’s been passed the rarest gift of all: a gift that’s not supposed to exist.

Now Willet must pursue the murderer still on the loose in Bunard even as he’s pulled into a much more dangerous and epic conflict that threatens not only his city, but his entire world–a conflict that will force him to come to terms with his own tortured past if he wants to survive.

My latest novel can be described by these 5 adjectives…Epic, suspenseful, character-driven, insightful, challenging.

My main character is…A man whose wounding and PTSD threaten to make him insane. In fact, he might already be there.

My main characters resemble…People in real life. My wife ran into an Iraqi-war veteran the other day and it was scary how similar he was to my hero in some ways.

A previously unknown fact about this novel is…It may eventually be a time-spanning series of 9 books…if people like it well enough.

My story’s spiritual theme is…War extracts as big or bigger price on the spirit as it does the body. Obedience often calls for perseverance even in the midst of suffering.

While writing this novel I was challenged by…The task of portraying current-day problems and issues in a believable way in a fantasy setting. Like my last series, there are a lot of elements in the story that are allegorical. I hope the readers will have fun figuring out what they all mean.

The title was chosen by…Me, after my first couple of suggestions got vetoed.

As an author, the hardest scenes for me to write are…Romantic tension. They’re difficult because my wife and I are wildly romantic, but there’s no subtext of challenge to it. It makes for a wonderful marriage, but doesn’t translate to readable fiction. I watch a lot of old movies to try and make up for it. Bogart, mostly.

The story I’m currently working on is…The sequel to The Shock of Night. It’s called The Shattered Vigil.

You may not know this about me, but I…can juggle and read at the same time. It’s fun, but there’s not a lot of possibility of going pro with a talent like that.

If I could be a character in any novel, I would want to be…Garion from the Belgariad by David Eddings. ~ great choice, Patrick! Garion is one of my all time favourite characters, too